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riel's blog

I am at the Red Hat Summit today. A huge crowd showed up and the room where I gave my presentation was pretty full, even after the fire alarm interrupted us several times.

This year I gave a presentation explaining how higher capacity, faster components can lead to slower system performance, what we can do to mitigate that at the operating system level and what users need to do at the application and deployment levels.

I have a number of domains that I have only used for email so far *cough*Spamikaze*cough*. I wonder what would happen if I set up those domains with some generic Drupal sites, with news feeds, forums, etc and exactly one link to these sites from the outside web. Will people find them? Will anybody use them? No, I'm not telling you the URLs, that would ruin the experiment :)

At least, that's what it claimed. Turns out that hunk of the patch was not actually applied, meaning there's a silent failure mode in patch. Check the bug report for details. Now I know how I lost this piece of code during a previous forward merge. Ugh...

For the past year I have been working on and off on a code base to make Linux memory management, specifically the pageout code, scale better to very large amounts of memory. The code has been stable for months and it is time to get wider testing, both by getting it merged into the -mm kernel and by making split LRU kernel RPMs for Fedora 9 available on my people.redhat.com page. Let me know how they work for you.

After a long (for me) walk/run with my wife, I watched the Phoenix landing on NASA TV. A Mars landing is tricky, one near the poles doubly so. The reason is that the martian atmosphere is mostly CO2, which can freeze and fall onto the ground in winter, making air pressure vary by as much as 30% from season to season. Now try planning heatshield and parachute timing for such a variable atmosphere...

My old home page consists of static HTML from almost a decade ago. Nothing wrong with that per se, except I never get around to actually editing it any more. I hope that using a content management system like Drupal will motivate me to write things more often, especially since Drupal has an integrated blog. Over the next week I will migrate over some of the content from my old site and I will put a redirect in place from the old blog to this one.